


Elizabeth

by blythely, Sparcck



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Elizabeth is girl!Bruce, Gen, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythely/pseuds/blythely, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparcck/pseuds/Sparcck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I thought the whole point was to not be an heiress."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elizabeth

 

Alfred takes the heavy policeman's coat off Beth's shoulders and picks her up and holds her tightly. Some of the policemen tell him to stop but he doesn't stop walking until they get to the car. Leslie is there and she hugs Beth and when Beth puts her arms around Leslie's neck all the pearls fall out of Beth's hands.

 

* * *

 

There are a lot of social workers. Some of them want to speak to Beth by herself, and they ask her stupid questions about Alfred, and she rolls her eyes a lot and says yes and says no to shut them up and make them go away. It's better when Leslie is around, but she's busy with her clinic.

The teachers at Beth's school are always checking to see that Beth is okay, are you okay, how is your home life, wouldn't you like to join the lacrosse team, you know you can always come and talk if you need to, it must be hard for a girl to lose her mother. Beth does join the lacrosse team but she leaves when the coach wants her to take off her necklace at practice. The hockey mistress doesn't like Beth's team spirit. Alfred has to come to the school and speak to the principal.

Alfred comes home with a pair of boxing gloves and Beth is grounded.

She starts a different school the next week.

 

* * *

 

Harvey is the only one who talks about her parents without looking uncomfortable. He's also the only one who still says things like, "They'll get 'im, Beth," and actually means it, actually looks like he knows he's going to be the one who does it.

Beth knows they'll never find him, forgets, even, who the "him" was. He's every slight shadow that follows her up the walk as the sun sets behind the manor, every face that every bully in her class is growing into.

When they spar the first time, Beth knocks Harvey down and he grins up at her with a thin line of blood cutting directly down the center of his filium, lips and chin.

 

* * *

 

A young police officer comes to PS 121 to teach self-defence for girls. When it's her turn to do the elbow-blow she lets him grab her from behind but she kicks his legs out and he lands with a thud.

He rubs his mustache. "Ever considered a career with the police force, miss?"

When Beth gets her purple obi Harvey doesn't speak to her for a while, but he's often moody, especially when his father's home. It's just as well, because school has let her skip the sophomore classes and she has a lot of AP homework to do now.

Leslie lets her sit in her office--she's never there, even if Beth is at the clinic past suppertime. Beth can write up her assignments and get through a chapter or two of anatomy a day. She's always careful to put the texts back on the shelf exactly where they were, but by the time she's reading the surgery procedurals Leslie has started to let her follow along on student rounds.

 

* * *

 

She gets fall-down drunk for the first time the day after her fifteenth birthday, when Harvey takes her out to dinner at Le Cirque, with Alfred and Leslie sitting five tables over, near the discreet kitchen doors. This is her official birthday party, after the "adult party" she had to have the day before because, she can never forget, she's still a Wayne.

"Alcohol causes deficits in retrieval of verbal and nonverbal information and visual spatial functioning in adolescents," she slurs, pointing at Harvey with a bit of roast lamb speared on the end of her fork.

One side of Harvey's mouth twitches up. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yes." She presses her fingers to the side of the third mojito that she had convinced the waiter to bring discretely and traces patterns in water on the linen. "And." The lamb falls off her fork. "They also perform poorly on tests of learning and memory, planning, and cog-cognitive flexibility." Her brain seems to be connecting to her mouth well enough without her full attention.

"I think maybe it's time to go." Harvey is at her elbow, his jacket a little too big on him and the sleeve getting tangled in his pocket when he digs for his wallet.

"You can't afford this, Harv," she whispers, but by the look on his face, her hand-off of verbal information seems to be affected as well.

"Elizabeth," Leslie is saying, her hand in the small of Beth's back, "let's go get some air while Alfred and Harvey settle the bill."

Harvey looks embarrassed and angry and Beth lets Leslie lead her out before he can say anything.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, her head feels five sizes too big and there's a rustling that sounds like the beat of huge leathery dragon wings. It's Alfred with the Sunday Gazette, turning a page that scrapes over her eardrums. She pushes her face into the pillow. "Teenage rebellion," she groans, "check it off the list, Alfred."

Alfred sighs and a moment later his hand cups the back of her skull, pushes her heavy hair off her neck and sits stroking her back while she drifts back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Leslie takes her to the Drake's Christmas party without Alfred. Beth hates thinking about him in the manor by himself on Christmas Eve, but she knows he needs the time to himself, especially around the holidays. There's a photo he keeps in his bedside table, from the war, that he thinks she doesn't know about: it's snowing in Russia in black and white but Alfred and his companion have tiny, tiny smirks.

Jack Drake compliments her smile and she laughs and blushes and tips back the rest of her champagne.

Across the room, Mrs. Drake is inclining her head toward Leslie with a knowing, motherly smile.

Jack has the same nice smile as well as nice brown eyes and a nice voice and knows a little about a lot of things. "I'm planning on attending Gotham U," he's saying, "but mother says I should think about backpacking first, see the world, you know?"

"Gonna go off and get too big for our tiny town?" She winks and he blushes a little and the waiter comes by with a tray. She puts her glass down and somehow her hand comes away with a tiny scrap of paper pressed into it.

Jack is picking through hors d'oeuvres and Beth unrolls the waxy paper between her thumb and middle finger.

_Blow this popsicle stand -- second floor terrace in ten. -O_

She slips it under her watchband just as Jack turns back to her. Over his shoulder, a sleek blond is grinning and tapping his own watch, one thick eyebrow arched, ridiculously obvious. He turns and strolls up the grand staircase, his hair curling over his collar.

She'll give herself five, she decides and smiles broadly at Jack. Or else it's too easy.

 

* * *

 

It's likely that Alfred would gladly teach her Mandarin, but it'd be filtered through his Received Pronounciation, so Beth multitasks and practises both her intonation and _chin na_ with Weiya Xi. Weiya is a tyrant who rules his pharmacy with fear and a bamboo flywhisk. He derives no small amusement in using both to correct Beth's manipulation of pressure points.

" _Laowai_ , you bother me and my customers again next week." It's not a question.

"Of course, _laoshi_."

The pharmacy is seven blocks from the clinic, so she jogs to meet Leslie and see if she can drive her home. She comes in through the side access as usual so it takes a few seconds to register that everything is very quiet, and it'll be the last time she pushes open a door unthinkingly because Leslie has a tight expression and a gun jammed in her side.

"Sit down, Beth," Leslie barks as the two men with weapons argue about the doors and what drugs to take. Leslie's t-shirt is soaked under the arms and Beth can see her hands actually shake as she sutures up a bloody knife wound in the side of a teenager.

"C'mon, doc," one of the gunmen hisses, "you better fix him good, right, else we'll be back, hear?"

"Of course," Leslie murmurs. There are quiet sobs from one of the patients. Beth is too angry to cry, but she's too angry to act, and there's two of them. Leslie might get shot. Leslie might be killed. Even if she could act, Beth might not get to the guns in time. Even if she could. If she could.

She could.

If.

 

* * *

 

She remembers that Leslie didn't call Alfred, but he was standing at the door when Leslie opened it that night, exactly 24 hours after she had slipped out of her bedroom window.

The apartment looked open and airy, still does, but it's tiny, and Beth didn't miss a staircase to sit at the top of while Leslie and Alfred decided what to to with her. Instead, she sat on the edge of Leslie's bed and listened while Leslie invited Alfred in. Their voices were a steady, low murmur.

It wasn't a question of not wanting to be found. It was not needing to be found.

Alfred's face, when she appeared in the archway to the kitchen, creased with a relieved smile. It wasn't that he worried, she had heard him say to Leslie in her tiny kitchen, not about Beth. But other people might worry. And that worried him.

 

* * *

 

"Why do you need all these shoes?" Harvey asks, holding a pair of strappy black Manolos by the heels as though they're poisonous. "I thought the whole point was to not be an heiress."

She takes the shoes deliberately from him and straps them into the hard top of a suitcase, along with three other pairs. "It is."

He watches in mostly silence as she packs, before blurting, "Miss you already."

"It's just Gotham U," she says carefully, watching his fingers twist his watch dial over and over. "You'll know where I am."

"If I need you."

She smiles, snaps final lock closed on her last case. "If you need me."

 

* * *

 

Continental routed her through Rome to Addis Ababa, and the smokey chaos of the Ciampino terminal rings in her ears even after an hour of first class. Anything of interest in the Lonely Planet guide sitting on her tray-table she read weeks ago; what little there is on Southern Ethiopia contains mainly cautions on bandits and malaria.

Medecin Sans Frontiers takes who it can in the famine-struck regions, even pre-med students, but Lesley's word counts for much. Beth realises she doesn't know if her father was in the Peace Corps, if he and her mother saw more of the world than the First Couple of Gotham ought to. Alfred will know. She'll ask in her first letter.

She's pleased she's doing this. It's fashionable to "take a year out" and backpack about; Jack's gone to Malaysia, Silver's even been two months in Turkey. So Beth's trip is just what everyone else is doing, and she won't cause Alfred and Leslie any unnecessary worry.

The heat when she steps down onto the tarmac is dry and airless, unlike any of the oppressive humidity of Gotham. The sky is silty with pollution over the city, azure behind, stretching away across the Rift Valley. It's more freedom than she's felt in her life, that sky and the fake passports in her jacket lining. She shoulders her satchel and heads for the terminal.

 

* * *

 

Even though the suite is a typical male-dominated dorm room in terms of filth and poor decoration, there's a 62-inch plasma screen showing the party in Times Square that no one is watching. No one sees her, either, as she empties her fifth solo cup of cheap champagne into one of the potted plants that she hopes isn't some important experiment.

"It's not," a voice says behind her, and she crumples the plastic cup in her reflexively clenched fist.

"The culmination of someone's doctoral thesis?" She turns in time to see him smother a smirk.

He raises one hairless ridge of an eyebrow. "Well, yes, it is. I thought you were wondering if it was worthwhile to be concerned." He holds out his hand. "Lex Luthor."

I know who you are, Beth doesn't say, and instead hands him the crushed cup. "Elizabeth Wayne."

"I know who you are." He runs a thumb into the indentation made by hers and she swallows against a very dry throat.

There's a cheer from the vicinity of the television and kitchenette, and people start counting down from ten as the ball drops.

He only lays one hand on her hip and lets her come to him when the count reaches zero; she imagines she can hear the noise of the plastic in his other hand as the cup finally gives way.

 

* * *

 

Beth picks up her cellphone while she skims Page Six. It's a blind item--there's no picture--but only a handful of the East Coast's Ameristocracy aren't at the Ivys, and she and Lex are conspicuous in Gotham.

He answers before it rings. "I was just about to call you."

She can picture him in his Birkenstocks, reading the papers on the balcony. It's a shame, in a way.

"Dynasty mergers are terribly conventional." She folds the paper to the crossword. "I'm afraid I shall have to say no."

Lex tuts. "And here I had a diamond cutter in Tel Aviv waiting for your call." At least he'd reached the same conclusions she had. Probably he relished the challenge in a more commercial conquest of Wayne Industries.

She looked forward to thwarting that, too.

Eleven across is _defeasance_. "Take care, Lex." She hangs up, swinging her legs on the ledge, looking out over the rooftops. 

 

 


End file.
